The final version of President Obama’s most significant climate change regulation, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, has yet to be completed, but the proposed rule has already faced its first federal court challenges. On April 16, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments in two lawsuits against the proposed rule. Policy Integrity submitted a brief for one of the cases, arguing that decades of precedent support the EPA’s approach to this rule. Sean Donahue, the lawyer for environmental parties in the case, explicitly referenced our brief during oral argument. During the argument, the judges emphasized that a court has never before overturned a proposed rule. And as Richard Revesz later noted, doing so “would create enormous mischief.”

Our new regulatory report focuses on the EPA’s regulation of dispersants used to clean up oil spills and other major pollution events. In January 2015, the EPA proposed revisions to the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan, which provides oversight for pollution response efforts. The proposed regulation is designed to ensure that chemical and biological agents used in cleanup efforts meet efficacy and toxicity requirements and that the pollution response community and dispersant consumers have sufficient information to make informed decisions. We submitted this regulatory report, which offers guidance on how the EPA can improve its cost-benefit analysis of the regulation, to the EPA as our public comments on the proposed rule.

Many critics and journalists have argued that President Obama is circumventing Congress with his actions on climate change. But as Richard Revesz recently toldUS News & World Report, Obama is “acting consistently with the will of Congress and doing something he was mandated to do under existing law.” According to Revesz, “the president is implementing the statute that is there, which is the Clean Air Act.” Courts have consistently reaffirmed the executive branch’s obligation to regulate greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. The article tracks Obama’s key actions on climate, showing that the Congressional evasion narrative does not hold up under scrutiny.

We expect to publish our survey results this summer

On the Docket: Surveying Expert Economists on Climate Change

Policy Integrity is conducting a survey of leading economists who have published on climate change, in order to help determine the expert consensus on economic risks and preferred policy options. The project expands on a similar survey we conducted in 2009, which suggested that expert economists believe uncertainty about climate change increases the value of mitigation efforts. We hope the survey findings will help add insight to debates about the costs and benefits of various climate policies. We expect to publish our results this summer.

Jonathan Cannon, a member of Policy Integrity’s advisory board and a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, has published a new book, Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court. Cannon’s book interprets a wide range of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, along with social science research and the literature of the green movement, to gauge the practical and cultural impact of environmentalism and its future prospects. “By analyzing the Supreme Court’s rulings on environmental cases since 1970, I was able to learn a great deal about the green movement’s achievements, as well as some of the reasons for current stalemates on climate change and other issues,” Cannon said.